Posts Tagged ‘wikileaks’

After seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five years in prison, Julian Assange is free.

WikiLeaks has made one a huge contribution to the world exposing corruption, human rights violations, war crimes committed by governments across the world. Governments come after you when you do stuff like that. Ask Assange. Or Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or David McBride. It takes much more backbone that I have to stand up against a government.

There were no unclear weapons in Iraq. There was no £350 million a week Brexit bonus for the NHS. There weren’t any doctors to staff the Nightingale hospitals and Seaborne Freight didn’t have any ferries. We’re so used to the lies and corruption at the highest levels we become completely blase about it, or protect ourselves by retrospectively saying that we never really believed any of it in the first place.

Thankfully, there are some people willing to stand up for the truth. Julian Assange is one of them.

Working out what to think about Julian Assange is a very, very difficult thing. Even for those of us in the Skeptics community, who are used to saying “it’s not quite a simple as that”, are left struggling to work out what is going on.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to this – Wikileaks has been an important development in creating a free, more open society. However, such services to the public do not qualify you from an exemption from rape, and if he did it, he should be brought to justice.

Of course we don’t know if he is guilty or not.

Last month, Australia’s ABC Network aired an episode entitled “Sex, Lies & Julian Assange“. It came out very favourably on the side of Assange. Biased? Possibly. But I’m not sure what the motive would be. It has a 50 year history and won many awards for their investigative journalism. In any case, the episode is available in full from their website, so you can make up your own mind.

EDIT: The video has now been removed from YouTube, but you can still watch it on ABC’s website.

I recently washed a Channel 4 documentary on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. While I had heard all about the exposing of the Iraq War Logs and a lot of the surrounding fall out, I was somewhat shocked at some of the footage shown in the documentary. I wondered how many other people had seen it, so I thought I would post the YouTube on here.